Clevelanders know how hard to is to be a Browns fan. We have learned through hard experience that it requires a high tolerance for heartbreak and pain, a ton of fortitude and devotion, and a level of delusional thinking so high we should probably be on serious medication.

But here's the question: If the Browns were to win the Super Bowl this year (stop laughing) (or crying), should it still be hard to be a fan?

Knowing what we now know about what the game does to the players – the multiple risk of concussions during a career, the related risk of brain trauma, the NFL player's average life expectancy of just 55 – should that elusive Super Bowl victory come with a least a tinge of remorse? Should we fans, who tacitly support the NFL and its team owners through our consumption of their product, feel any responsibility?

I don't mean to rain on our imaginary Super Bowl parade, especially on the Sunday before the regular season starts. I just read two excellent books about football, though, and I'm pondering the tough moral and ethical questions they ask.

When I selected the books, I thought I was taking on a point-counterpoint debate by two highly regarded essayists. On the pro side: "Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game," by Mark Edmundson (Penguin Press, 229 pp., $26.95). On the con side: "Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto" by Steve Almond (Melville House, 178 pp., $22.95).

But the debate turned out to be more nuanced than I expected. For while Edmundson makes an emotional case for the life lessons he absorbed playing high school football, and for the pleasures of watching the game as a fan, a son and a father, he is too honest a writer not to wrestle with the negatives that come with it, primarily the issue of the traumatic brain damage many players sustain.

And while Almond follows through on his brazen title with a robust and multifaceted argument against football, he, too, wrestles with ambivalence. He proclaims early and often that he is a longtime football fan, one who has suffered the slings and arrows cast by a team not unlike the Browns: the Oakland Raiders. But he is a reluctant, guilt-ridden fan who, in this book, examines his own conscience and asks the reader to do the same.

Almond's book is slim but potent: He's a former journalist who has done his research, and though this is primarily an extended essay, he has added a bit of original reporting. He is also a superb writer. Though he calls it a manifesto, "Against Football" does not simply throw bombs; Almond makes his case in a style that is conversational, self-deprecating, sharp and often laugh-out-loud funny. (There's an irresistible bit about an Italian woman's assessment of the game's twin natures of homophobia and homoeroticism. Don't miss it.)

He opens with a useful and brief history of the game, beginning with its origins in the early 19th century as a kind of violent hazing ritual at elite universities. It soon grew into an "astonishingly brutal" game, so brutal that 18 players died in 1904, prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to call for reforms.

He then segues into his own origin story as a fan, recalling his childhood watching the Raiders in their glory years with his father, and his painful devotion to the team ever since. Having established his stadium cred, he launches his manifesto, attacking on several fronts.

The unavoidable first target is the damage the game does to its players, focusing on the brain trauma caused not just by concussions, but by sub-concussive hits. This damage, Almond says, is inflicted "not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played."

As in last year's alarming and infuriating expose, "League of Denial," by ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, he excoriates the NFL for its longtime denial and obfuscation of the problem. He further takes on the league by breaking down the devious financial wheeling and shameful tax dealing that made it the behemoth economic force it is today. He persuasively paints the set-up as a massive fleecing of the taxpayers and a nearly risk-free boondoggle by billionaire owners.

His thoughts on the homophobia, racism and tolerance for violence against women, too prevalent in the league, are also worth reading. On racism, he asks: "What does it mean that millions of white fans cheer wildly for African-American men in the context of a football game when, if they encountered these same men on a darkened street, they might very well reach nervously for their cell phone?"

"Why Football Matters" does not serve entirely as a rejoinder to these arguments. Edmundson acknowledges that "football has a dark side, too," and gamely explores these issues even as he focuses on the good that football can and does do.

He writes about how playing football as a junior and senior in high school "educated" him, transforming him from a poor student and "buttery, oversensitive boy, credulous and shy" into a disciplined, mature, confident young man.

Chapter by chapter, he illustrates how what he learned during practices and games, even as a middling player, translated into character, courage, loyalty and other virtues.

In contrast to Almond's energy and wit, Edmundson, who teaches in the English department at the University of Virginia, tends to be eloquent and nostalgic. He brings the worlds of literature and pop culture to his playing field, citing everyone from George Carlin to Sigmund Freud, Herman Melville to Ralph Ellison.

The brutal "Battle Royal" in Ellison's "Invisible Man" provides the foundation for his chapter on race. There, he notes the uncomfortable truth that with African Americans now representing 70 percent of NFL players, "Pro football is at least in part about black people blasting each other at the stadium and on TV," while "white Americans savor" the spectacle.

Edmundson is at his best when he contrasts Homer's battling heroes, Achilles and Hector, in his chapter on courage. He made me think anew about both football and "The Iliad." (And made me want to read "The Iliad" again.)

But while Edmundson's writing is an English major's delight, in the end he fails to persuade me the way Almond does. After reading "Against Football" (not to mention "League of Denial"), I don't think I can ever watch a football game -- I mean, consume the NFL's product -- the same way.

Can you? Will you?

Almond closes his book with a simple message to his fellow fans: "I'm sorry." He knows how much football means to millions of Americans, just as he knows that his manifesto will ruin it for many of them.

I know how much the Browns – no matter how they play -- matter to Cleveland. So in the same spirit, I will close the same way: I'm sorry, Cleveland. But please read the book.

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